There's a fine line between fishing and just standing on the shore like an idiot.

Regardless of if you are using low cost or free advertising (like Traffic Exchanges) or an expensive CPA campaign, the way to squeezing the most results from your advertising dollars is by following up with your potential consumers.

We’re living in a time now that gives is more opportunities to connect with our customers (or potential customers) than ever before, but email remains one of the most trusted form of online communication. The benefits to building your email subscribption list are obvious to those who participate, but if you’re thinking of whether or not building a list is right for you, it can seem like a confusing and daunting task.

Advertising Multiple Products

If you are advertising multiple complimentary products than building a list is a necessity. When you advertise your product on traffic exchanges, viral mailers, or CPA advertising like Google Adwords, you are paying per click (or page view) so when your consumer views your ad, you have an opportunity there to generate a sale. However when they close the page or skip over your ad, that opportunity is now lost. Instead, if you focus on capturing them on an email list or newsletter, you are given an opportunity to generate repeat advertising. Why waste your one opportunity when you can leverage it and turn it into multiple sales opportunities? Obviously two is greater than one, so instead of just presenting your dry sales page, create an opportunity for them to join your email list this so you can continue to advertise products to them.

Repeat Visitors

If you are into blogging or have your own sales website, building an email list is the cornerstone of an effective marketing campaign. Being able to remind members, or potential members, of your product or service are essential to bringing them back. In some cases your potential customer may have been greatly interested in your product, but be browsing on their cell phone or have to run to make it to an appointment and don’t have the time right now to complete the registration process. By using an email list you can remind your customers of your product and service and drive repeat visitors to your sales opportunity, or bring them back to your next blog post.

Follow Up

Any experienced sales person will tell you that follow up is crucial to generating sales. Studies have shown that only 2% of sales are generated on the first contact, simply being able to follow up with your customer will generate a massive increase in opportunity for sales. By allowing your potential customer to share their email address with you, you have an opportunity to contact them a second, third, fourth (etc) time and follow up with your potential customers to generate sales.

Build Trust

In the last point we mentioned that only 2% of sales are generated on the first contact, this means that 98% of all customers will not purchase until a certain level of trust has been developed. Being able to have them subscribe to your email list or newsletter creates an opportunity for you to provide value and build trust, to create a line of communication with your potential customer. You can leverage this contact opportunity to build trust and confidence with your product which will help drive sales with new leads.

The internet is a very noisy place, and it can be extremely difficult to share your message in a noisy social world. As a marketing an advertising expert I see tons of opportunities lost every day in advertising by people not creating an opportunity to follow up and build trust with their potential consumers. A simple list building strategy can be used to maximize sales right now and start turning leads into customers, and new visits into repeat traffic.

Like many people who enter our market, I was very eager and excited to get started. I did have some experience already with my business I [was trying to] created and doing online advertising using things like Google, Y! Marketing (when it existed) and Social Media Marketing – I had a few clients and felt pretty decently about my ability. After I lost my job in December of ’09 and wrapped up a 6 month job search only receiving 1 interview (which lead to a job offer…. working 8 hours a week) I quickly realized that the traditional get a job go to work every day thing just simply was no longer an option and decided there was no better time than to take this business I was trying to create to the next level. I discovered Traffic Exchanges as I was looking for non-traditional ways to advertise my business. I started out promoting an opt-in page for a splash page creation service – as there was an obvious need for graphic designers, and my major was Multimedia Design in college, I thought it was a clear market demand I could fill.

After not getting a client for about a month I started looking around more and discovered that the pricing of what was the going rate for Graphic Designers locally, was way beyond the realm of what my audience was asking for, and there was simply no way I could compete with everyone outsourcing graphics to India and other places where people were doing full website designs for $25-$50. It was only a matter of time before I got sucked into a get rich quick scheme – and although I did make some pretty good money off of it, I never made that $13,000,000 I was promised on the sales page.

I launched a couple of small sites after that, first being The L Team which was a team website I created for The site I was using, and after that I created the original Affiliate Toolbox (not the version that exists today). After using Traffic Exchanges I thought that to be the obvious next step, and knowing far too little about the market – launched Traffic Swirl.

Traffic Swirl went well, or at least I thought it was good – It went for about a year and a half of 10 member a day joining, 30k hits delivered a day, I thought I had good activity but looking back, it was nothing. My programming skills got better and there was a massive market for programmers so I started programming for other people, essentially parting out my site, reselling the things that made it unique..

Something I realized after programming mods and working on just over 100 different Traffic Exchanges, was that every key feature that people loved about Traffic Swirl, was now spread all over the internet.

I stopped programming for other people, though my mods continued to get resold by former clients, even to this day people are reselling my work from 2 years ago, some of the rigths of which I have even sold to LFM who sell some of my mods on their official website – but the point is – the site was not mine anymore, it was a collection of random features that now everybody else had.

How I went from earning $25,000 a year with my internet business, to over $100,000 a year from my business happened almost overnight.

I said “To hell with it!”

I had been running my business in a market I wasn’t entirely familiar with, and was just sort of following the stream and trying to stay on the front end of trends – and one day I decided, screw it.. I’m going to do it my way. I got sick of doing things just because I thought they should be done, and decided to take the chances and try things out. When something was always done one way instead of doing it that way, I decided to dig deeper, “Why is it done that way?” and begin to test alternatives – that very first month I doubled my sales and signups.

It isn’t some formula, some training package, there’s no sales page or product to buy – it’s something you already have.

It’s you.

If you truly want your business to succeed – the biggest “secret” is to stop listening to what people tell you to do – and start doing things.

So what’s my secret weapon? It’s me.

You are the biggest resource and tool you have in your business – if you are not at the level you want to be, and are going to the LFMTE conference every month and buying the latest mod for your site…. well there’s your problem.

Are you trying to build the same site everyone else has? Or are you trying to build YOUR site?

Sure some mods are great, but if you have the same features as every other site, why should I even join yours? How will I even remember yours exists when there is nothing different about it?

All it takes, is being you, and putting you into it. The entire foundation of the success of my business is thinking ‘You know what would be kind of cool?’ and then putting it into action.

Don’t get me wrong, new features and increased functionality (value) are excellent, but not when it is the same stuff going in to every site…

People talk about Traffic Exchanges being full of freebie seekers and people who don’t want to pay for things, but I have found the opposite to be true, there are tens if not hundreds of thousands of people waving their wallets in the air just begging, searching everywhere for a site that is worth spending their advertising dollars on, I know because I’m one of those people.

But when you present a site that is just a clone of the last 10 sites they were at, but with different colors – what’s the point? Why waste my time? I already know what the site has to offer because I’ve already been to a dozen that were the exact same.

It’s all a matter of perspective, Derek Sivers talks about in a video — he says “What’s obvious to you is amazing to someone else” and that is something that couldn’t be more true. My biggest success’ in my business have been things that I thought were obvious, no big deal, just another day at the office.. but then I get members who praise it and say holy cow I can’t believe what a great idea that is, and to me it was just something I thought a couple of people might like.

What’s the difference between me running a six figure business, and you who are struggling to make a profit? I took that step. I said let’s try it. That’s it.

It doesn’t matter how silly or seemingly obvious it is, if you have an idea — take action on it. “Put it out and let the world decide” (Sivers)

The most important thing to understand is that when you put YOU into it, You literally CAN NOT fail. People LOVE to see you trying new things, even if it’s a major flop, you will be building some very loyal fans who are so happy just to see you trying something new, that they’ll forget whether or not it actually was successful, and if it is NOT successful, that just simply means you know another way that doesn’t work, and knowing which ways don’t work are the secret sauce to discovering which ways do.

So if you are a business owner, my only request for you is that the next random Idea you get for your business — do it, take action – regardless of how little or big, silly or serious, obvious or amazing – just do it. There’s a massive market out there waiting for you to take that step, so take it, no matter how obvious or dumb the idea seems.

“Things that seem obvious to you, are amazing to others. Are you holding back something that seems to obvious to share?” – Sivers

So what’s the secret to running a six figure business? Just be you – do it your way, do what feels right, and ignore everyone else.